It's Where My Demons Hide
by banditseven
Summary: Draco's known as the cocky, defensive, anti-protagonist Slytherin, who lashes at anyone who steps close, but nobody's bothered to ask him why.


Choking, spluttering, drowning. Ironically alike breathing, he might've quoted.  
The choppy, black rolls of water threw him below and to the surface, dragging the very air from his putrid, dried lungs. Rumbles of thunder cracked across the bleak, empty night sky above him, the only company to him other than the waves set on pulling him to the lake's surface. He'd learned by now that opening his mouth was not the way to handle his situation. It would just invite more of the writhing depths into his airways. He tried to scream through closed, chapped lips. To no avail.  
The nightmare came in flashes; one minute he was asleep, eyes boring into pitch blackness. The next, an array of unnervingly close to reality tides and glares of lightning bolts, unnaturally loud claps of thunder tearing into his ears. He felt rather as if he was in a game of impassioned, brutal tennis of sorts, and he was the ball.  
His head ached sorely from the mental lurching to and fro, when finally, he caught sight of something other than the slicing surges of black water. Two figures.  
His sleek, blonde hair was matted down on his face, sections at the back still afloat under the water. He coughed, heaving up the masses of liquid in his chest. Shaking his head, freeing his eyes of blurred vision, he heard a single word.  
"Draco."  
He knew that voice from a mile, ten, ten thousand miles away. Retching up another flood after being momentarily unsurfaced, again, he manged to spurt out the only word he could manage.  
"Fa-father."  
Even though he was then pulled back under, from both the forces of his imagination and exhaustion, he heard another voice, clear as his hair was white. "Hello, Malfoy."  
Harry.  
Not again, not again. No, no, no, no.  
Lucius proceeded to speak again, in a tormentingly calm tone. "Ah, Draco. You always were so, what's the word-melodramatic, weren't you? No different now, hey?"  
Still thrashing underwater, he tried to scream his defense, though just received another supernatural tug on his leg, pulling him further into the black ocean. "You see, though, Draco, Harry here, he would never do such a thing. You know, son, be such a, how should I put it kindly to you, such a, disappointment." Lucius' voice cut through the water sharper than a knife, these familiarly intolerable words slicing his ears, slashing into his head. "You do understand, Draco, that if you were more like Harry Potter, you would never've had to grow up to be on the side you're on. You could've been special, Draco, honestly. But you're just so god-forbidden selfish, you do know that?"  
Draco emerged from the icy depths once more, somehow closer to the now clear island that his father and Harry were upon. Lucius smiled down at him wickedly, crouching as he did so. He reached down to hold Draco's quivering chin, making no attempt to humor him or give him any form of help whatsoever. "Do it for me, Draco." The white-haired boy struggled against his father's superhuman grip, punching all his limbs against the water. "N-no!" he spat, "I won't drown f-for you, or f-fucking anyone."  
His father nodded knowingly, then slumped down into a cross-legged position, patronizingly patting the patch of dried grass beside him, inviting the boy with glasses to sit. Turning back to Draco, Lucius licked his lips viciously. "Okay, one last shot at the barrel then, son." Draco's father grabbed him roughly, seizing his sodden shirt and heaving him out of the water, then dropping him back in, chuckling heartily as he watched his son struggle to rise through the skin of the lapping mass. As the boy materialized again, re-appearing, the man opened his mouth to speak. Draco made cold-hearted eye contact with his father, swapping looks of disgust, this dream all too vivid.  
As his old man neared, Draco hoped, hell, he prayed that the words he knew were coming would be interrupted. However, his father opened his mouth once more, uttering the words that flooded his thoughts for days each and every time he had been ridden with this nightmare.  
Wincing, the blonde, drowning boy heeded the four words that haunted him, night after night, day after day.  
"Do it, for Harry."

Draco sat bolt upright in his bed, soaked in his own sweat, his bed sheets clung to him from the waist down. His forehead was matted with his poorly cut fringe, and his chest ached from heaving and tossing. His bare torso was clenching with stitches, his eyes wide as lamps. Draco's orbs fluttered around the dorm anxiously, and caught sight of his two, very pissed off, accompaniments. He tilted his head in innocent, shaken question; asking what they'd heard or seen. However, neither of the kooks replied. Crabbe collapsed grumpily on his bed muttering about '2 o'clock in the morning is not a good time for Potter dreamy-weamies', and Goyle simply grunted, "Just shut up and go to fucking sleep, Malfoy, for fuck's sake."  
Draco nodded, still breathing heavily. He slumped back on his bed, peeling off his sweat-ridden sheets. He then proceeded to curl up in a ball on his dampened mattress and sob, and if you listened very, very carefully, you might've just heard his tears sink into the linen and he bitterly whispered.

'I would never die for you, Potter.'


End file.
